In the music industry, a DJ creates a “mashup” by mixing two or more songs, often taking the vocals from one song and combining it with the music and beats of another song.
In the online world mashups are very similar. In technology, a mashup – or hybrid text – content and combines information from different into one page. . Think RSS feeds for entire websites. These computer mashups have become very popular as people save time savings and try to combine different pages into one experience.
Three of some of the world’s biggest computer, Internet and technology players – Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google – entered the mashup business, paying services that would allow end users to create their own mashups.
Mashups are no longer a tech trend among geeks. With the advent of Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft-sponsored mashups, they are here to stay and will probably start to play a bigger role in how we use the Internet.
This review of mashup editors is provided by Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google and which ones you should use.
Yahoo! Fistula
Yahoo! says “Pipes” is an interactive data aggregator and handler that allows you to mashup your favorite online data sources.” It also promises to “bring many feeds into one, then sort, spread and transfer them to your custom feeds; Genocide favorite fans and events will run through the interactive map; send back your favorite data sources and use Pipeline to power the new application” and more. Does that sound very geeky? It is. Yahoo! uses the environment drag and drop to modify and build your mashup application. It gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of customizing what you build, but it’s more technical.
Google Mashup Editor
Google says “creating mashups with Google couldn’t be easier. In just a few lines of code and one click of a button, you can publish mashups for the world to see.” Whether this is true or not, it is impossible to know because Google Mashup Editor is currently kept in beta, and we know how much Google likes to keep its products and services in beta indefinitely (remember when Gmail, the email service was in beta. …for a year?). You can visit the Google Mashup Editors web page and ask them to release it with you.
Google’s Mashup Editor is very technical, more so than Yahoo!’s. It allows you to use coding like Javascript, HTML (hyper-text markup language), CSS and XML. Geeks might like this, although average everyday users might find computer coding too difficult to use in a practical way.
Microsoft Popfly
Microsoft says “Popfly is a fun, easy way to build and share graphics, gadgets, web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts: 1) Popfly is a visual media creator on building web pages and mashups and 2) Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users .
Unlike products from Yahoo! and Google, Microsoft’s highly visual mashup editor, doesn’t require you to get out your computer code book. It’s perfect for people who want an easy way to make a mashup without dealing with the technical side of things, and it also works with Firefox (What’s this? Or Microsoft playing nice for once?). Unfortunately, the ease-of-use comes with a tradeoff: Popfly isn’t like gaming. But most people don’t mind.
